The New Muckrakers

By Ed Magnusan

EXPENDABLE AMERICANS

by PAUL BRODEUR 274 pages. Viking. $8.95.

MUSCLE AND BLOOD

by RACHEL SCOTT 306 pages. Dutton. $8.95.

Work can kill you. Workers have always known it. And from Charles Dickens to Upton Sinclair, gifted writers have assailed the inhumanity of employers who disregard the disease-dealing, injury-inflicting conditions under which their employees labor. Since the 1930s, though, with the rise of powerful unions and the spread of reforms, it has been widely assumed that the health and safety of most workers has been adequately protected, at least in the United States. In many industries that is true enough. Yet death and crippling dangers still threaten to a dismaying degree even behind some of the most streamlined of modern industry's antiseptic factory fac,ades. An official estimate by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare says that about 100,000 U.S. workers will die this year from occupational diseases. Hundreds of thousands more will be infected by dust-borne poisons that may kill or disable them later. According to the authors of these two books, almost no one, except relatives of the victims, seems to care.

Now, in the best tradition of the early muckrakers, both Paul Brodeur and Rachel Scott movingly demonstrate their concern. Scott, 27, studies what she calls "industrial slaughter in America." Brodeur, 43, analyzes in extraordinary detail the "delayed carnage" of disease-inducing chemicals and fiber-laden air that exist in all too many of today's factories. The pair worked separately (Scott full time for three years, Brodeur intermittently for six) but often on the same scandalous health conditions. The tone of their writing is largely nonpolemical and convincing. They name the offending corporations, pin down the evasions of company doctors, reveal the indifference of Government bureaucrats charged with enforcing industrial health laws. They come to a common conclusion: for many years, many industries, doctors and Government agencies have joined in a tacit conspiracy to downplay industrial dangers in order not to panic workers, tarnish corporate images or endanger profits. Brodeur is especially effective in detailing the overlapping membership of medical experts on boards that advise both industry and the Government agencies that set safety standards, mostly with the good of industry in mind.

Tragic Numbers. Brodeur's work, an expansion of a series of articles for The New Yorker, focuses primarily on the dangers of asbestos fibers, which have long been inhaled in unsafe quantities by workers using this insulating and fire-resistant material. Despite years of warnings by independent medical researchers--and the persistent denial of danger by industry-paid health experts--the destructiveness of asbestos has been established beyond doubt. The fibers cling to the linings of the lungs, scar those organs, and induce asbestosis, a progressive and irreversible disease.

The disease shortens breath, causes chronic coughing, renders its victims incapable of sustained physical exertion and eventually kills. Less predictably, but in tragic numbers, asbestos produces cancers of the lung, colon or stomach (TIME, Jan. 28). No level of exposure is known to be safe. Children playing around asbestos dumps, wives who wash the work clothes of their asbestos-laborer husbands and people living near asbestos factories have been affected.

Brodeur relates how officials of the Pittsburgh Corning Corp. were finally pressured by a few concerned Government inspectors and union leaders to do something about the excessive amount of fiber detected in air samples taken as early as 1967 at their dusty asbestos plant in Tyler, Texas. But not before the damning results of the tests were filed away for four years by complacent higher Government officials. The plant was eventually closed rather than meet higher health standards. The workers were never warned that the fiber concentration far exceeded the unsafe standards then in effect or even that asbestos was dangerous. Company doctors told ailing employees to stop smoking. When one protested that he smoked nothing but an occasional cigar, a Tyler plant manager told him he must be drinking too much milk--the spot on his lung X ray was a calcium deposit. When 31% of the rats exposed to one type of asbestos dust in a medical experiment developed lung cancer, an industry researcher argued that it must have been caused by metal tracings from the hammer used to pound the material into dust. "Nobody ever said to me that the stuff could hurt you," Hubert Thomas, who had worked at the Tyler plant and now cannot walk a block without stopping to catch his breath, told Brodeur. But then he recalled one warning from J.W. McMillan, another plant manager: "It's funny, ain't it? I mean, Mr. McMillan knew it was dangerous, and he died of cancer himself not long ago, but he never said to wear a mask."

Brodeur quotes Pittsburgh Coming's health director, Dr. Lee B. Grant, as telling one federal investigator that there was no danger at the Tyler plant, for an appalling reason: "That place is so dusty none of the men work there long enough to get sick." Covering some of the same ground, Scott reports that Dr. R.T.R. DeTreville, president of the Industrial Health Foundation, visited a pipe-manufacturing plant near Pittsburgh, where two workers had been hospitalized after being exposed to epoxy resins. Asked by a British doctor working with him why the plant was not closed until the extent of the danger was assessed, DeTreville replied, "You can't do that. You can't stop industry. Besides, if we stop it now, we can't study it." Scott drew a similar response from a state official empowered to enforce industrial health standards in Michigan. "A lot of these things aren't life and death deals," he told her. "This thing's been going on 100 years. Who are we to shut them down in one hour?" Yet in the asbestos industry alone, 200,000 workers are employed and another 800,000 have been. Among that million workers, a new official of HEW's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimates that there will be 3,000 excess deaths each year for the next 20 or 30 years from cancer of the lung and respiratory disease.

Burning Story. Scott is a freelance writer and newspaperwoman (Winston-Salem Journal, Baltimore Sun) who specializes in industrial hazards and environment. Her research ranges more widely than Brodeur's. She tracks down cases of beryllium disease among workers who handle that high-strength, lightweight metal. They not only develop respiratory symptoms similar to asbestosis but suffer from heart and liver damage that produces a 30% mortality rate. She deals with lung damage from such new chemicals as tolylene diisocyanate, widely used in foam rubber products; nerve diseases caused by various new solvents used in the printing industry; damage to nerves and organs from carbon disulfide among workers in rayon textile plants. Muscle and Blood also explores continuing safety hazards in the mining and automobile industries, as well as the psychological stresses in automated assembly operations.

Both books have flaws. For a writer of well-told short stories and novels, Brodeur is agonizingly plodding, repetitive and needlessly complex in his report. He quotes sources directly and at great length, in precise but stilted language that sounds too edited to be accurately conversational. Scott tells a more graphic and human story but takes less care with definitions and statistics. She is thus more vulnerable to industry counterattack than the meticulous Brodeur. Yet theirs is a burning story that needs telling. As old-fashioned crusaders, Scott and Brodeur should stimulate public concern over a largely unrecognized menace to hundreds of thousands of men and women.

qedEd Magnuson

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